Individual sealed containers in various sizes, shapes and forms have become increasingly popular in packaging numerous comestible products, such as juices, milk, ice cream, yogurt, etc. Over the years it has become more and more prevalent to associate a plurality of such containers together for ease of handling during shipment and storage, and for ultimate sale as a unit.
Special types of packaging equipment have been developed that are capable of filling and sealing multiple rows of containers. For example, commonly assigned, copending Mueller U.S. patent application Ser. No. 282,758, filed Aug. 22, 1972, now U.S. Pat. No. 3,838,550 granted Nov. 1, 1974, discloses an apparatus for continuously filling multiple rows of containers, sealing the containers with a continuous film or foil, and severing the foil longitudinally and transversely between adjacent containers to produce multiple rows of filled and sealed containers.
With the ever increasing use of single portion product containers for institutional and other commercial uses, as well as for retail use, convenient packaging methods and packaging apparatus have become most important. With the advent of continuously operating filling machines, such as disclosed in the above-identified Mueller application, which are capable of producing large quantities of filled containers at high production speeds, new packaging apparatus and methods have become necessary to handle the output of such machines. Heretofore, containers have been packaged separately in groups by hand, or have been formed into interconnected upright groups associated together by carrier members, as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,539,071, or associated together by the container closure structure, as disclosed, for example, in the above-mentioned Mueller application. Hand packaging is obviously less efficient with respect to labor cost than a fully automated method. Interconnected upright group packages of containers result in considerable storage space and material cost increases. There has been a long felt need for a high speed collating and packaging technique which will economically produce a package consisting of a plurality of individual filled and sealed containers.